of music from pure beauty of form and development of melodic ideas
toward the representation of ideas not musical in themselves has
been going on, as we have seen, from the very beginning. But at the
outset there was no endeavor to translate mental processes into
musical terms. As far back as the middle of the fifteenth century the
story of Susanna was told in unaccompanied choral music of purely
contrapuntal pattern. But there was no subtlety in such music.
The text set forth the narrative; the music was a mere framework.
Jannequin wrote his "Cries of Paris" in a similar style, but his
musical effects consisted of a few primitive imitations of externals.
Kuhnau's descriptive sonatas contain nothing confusing. They are
cheerfully frank in their endeavor to paint externals. They do not
probe either heart or brain. Not till the association of music with
the drama in the opera of the Italians of 1600, do we find the tone
art deliberately set to work to embody the inner life of man, and
then feelings alone were set forth.
The effort to embody feelings in vocal music was intelligible and
natural. Song borrowed its inflections from speech, and speech
took them from inarticulate cries. Peri's notion of using a smooth
movement and a narrow range of intervals for unimpassioned song was
taken from the instinctive practice of speech. We speak in two or
three notes, and slowly and regularly when we are perfectly calm.
When we become excited, our voices move through more intervals and
the tempo is accelerated. In agitation the speech is in broken,
spasmodic phrases; the voice rises and falls irregularly. In sadness
the minor mode comes involuntarily into our tones, and in weeping we
slide portamento through the chromatic scale.
When Gluck revived the method of Peri and worked it out elaborately,
he struck the deathblow to classicism, but his conservation of the
musical principle is to be found in his continued employment of
the purely musical forms. It was not for Gluck, a sculpturesque
composer, a worshipper of melodic line and curve, to enter into the
new paradise of operatic tone-speech. He pruned the old tree of many
useless limbs; he swept from it a mass of noisome fungi; but he
sat peacefully under its shade and knew not that its trunk pointed
slantwise away from the zenith.
Gluck faced the parting of the ways, but saw it not. With the young,
ingenuous, unsophisticated, and absolutely musical symphony of
Haydn staring him in the eyes, he failed to discover that its basic
principles were not available for the construction of an art form
embodying his dramatic ideals. The cyclic form of the plain song was
predominant in the thought of Gluck, and it misled him from his own
chosen path.
Weber failed to become a writer of speculative music for the same
reason. He utilized the Volkslied form in his operas, and thus kept
music in her throne of rule over text. Yet the effort of these two
men toward an intelligible expression of feeling in music was bound
to affect the composers of purely instrumental works.
There is no question in any mind that music can express feeling, or,
at any rate, arouse it. From the earliest time there has been music
for the feast and music for the funeral. Joy and sorrow have spoken
their hearts in the accents of song. Practice in the employment of
the elements of musical expression was bound to make the utterance
clearer, and when the rule of the ecclesiastic scales had been broken
and the modern major and minor modes had come into their own, it was
but another step to the complete inheritance of the chromatic world
which Cyprian di Rore strove to open up as far back as 1544.
It was when Wagner threw over the entire apparatus of the cyclic
form and the _lied_ and utilized to the utmost the resources of
chromatic modulation, that music in the drama entered completely into
the office of emotional expression. A new form was developed: that in
which a set of melodic fragments, each with a definite significance,
was woven into an instrumental ocean upon which the voice-parts
floated like enchanted shallops. Wagner fairly fulfilled the Pater
conception of the truly speculative artist, one "by whom no touch of
the world of form, color, and passion was disregarded." Gluck treated
poetry as a jewel, for which he as an artist was to provide the most
chaste, beautiful, and appropriate setting. Wagner viewed poetry and
music as two precious metals which he was to melt in the crucible of
his genius into a new and more glorious product.
We stand to-day, in so far as opera is concerned, upon the ground
cleared for us by Wagner. The Italians are striving to follow
his lead, though they are instinctively and almost ineffectively
endeavoring to preserve in their works that outward shape of vocal
melody which is a clearly drawn national characteristic. Since
Verdi's "Falstaff" nothing has been written which is of high import,
for the calm contemplation of criticism cannot be deceived by the
superficial cleverness of "Tosca," "La Bohème," and "Pagliacci," or
the Mascagni turgidities. These works sparkle with the jewels of
talent, but they never glow with the sunlight of genius. One act of
Verdi's "Otello" or Boito's "Mefistofele" pales their reflected fires
to the sickly yellow of a farthing rushlight.
But these writers are striving to advance beyond Wagner in the
subtlety of the inner processes which they put into music. In all
the Wagnerian drama there is no such purely modern product as the
Scarpia of Puccini or the Osaka of Mascagni. Loge is elemental. He is
a superhuman poetic creation, as well suited to the investiture of
music as Milton's Lucifer. But setting Scarpia and Osaka to music is
much like composing Joseph Chamberlain or Thomas Collier Platt.
The reaction of all this refinement of the means of expression in
the musical drama upon instrumental music has led the song without
words into a new country. The primitive descriptions of Kuhnau
and Bach now make us smile. We have hunted the central secret to
its lair. We have asked music to sing not only those broad moods
of joy and sadness, peace and rage, which the imitation of the
inflections of the voice in speech made possible for her in the very
infancy of inarticulate song, but we have demanded that she chase
the intellectual concept to its source and embody reasonings and
conclusions as if she were the handmaid of the inductive method.
So far have we gone that we can no longer blame those primitive
thinkers who seek to fasten a story upon every composition. We find
even so calm a commentator as Sir George Grove regretting that
Beethoven did not prefix a descriptive title to the fifth symphony in
order that we might discover his expressional purpose.
We have reached a situation which reduces music to a secondary
position. She is no longer a proud and independent art, in which,
as Mr. Pater notes, the substance and the form are one. The classic
forms in which purely musical beauty was contained, in which the
attempts at expression were confined to broad mood painting and
the methods were always those of thematic development, are used by
comparatively few composers. The title "symphony" is placed upon
works which have few of the characteristics of the Beethoven model.
True, these works do not, because they cannot, abandon the
fundamental principles of musical form. Even the tone poems of
Richard Strauss are built in accordance with these inexorable
laws. Architecture cannot do away with walls and roofs and floors,
nor the consideration of weight-sustaining power. But its outward
presentations may and do travel far away from the manner of the
Greeks.
Music no longer exists for herself. She seeks material always from
without. Who writes now an "overture, scherzo, and finale"? Even
Schumann, one of the pioneers of the modern romantic movement, did
that; but our overfed imaginations require stimulation in the shape
of titles. It must be an overture to an East Indian poem, which none
of us ever read, or a symphonic fantasia on a Buddhistic doctrine,
or a theme and variations setting forth the thoughts and actions
of an allegorical character who was in himself a satire upon a
generalization. In order that we may know what the composer is trying
to tell us in the inarticulate language of the song without words,
we must have a long and perplexing explanation by a learned pundit
who constructs programme notes with the aid of a public library and a
few Delphic hints from the composer himself. Then we must sit in the
concert room gravely contemplating these notes while the orchestra is
playing the music, and seriously endeavoring to delude ourselves into
the belief that we can perform two mental processes at once,--namely,
reading and grasping the fulness of the programme explanation at the
same time that we listen to and analyze the composition.
It seems about time for us to return to our Ambros and study his
admirable book on the "Boundaries of Music and Poetry." Here is his
just and convincing conclusion: "But in its ideal feature, music
keeps within its natural boundaries so long as it does not undertake
to go beyond its expressional capacity,--that is, so long as the
poetical thought of the composer becomes intelligible from the moods
called forth by his work and the train of ideas stimulated thereby,
that is, from the composition itself; and so long as nothing foreign,
not organically connected with the music itself, must be dragged in
in order to assist comprehension."
How many of our ultra-refined orchestral studies in logic will stand
examination in the searching light of that proclamation? Yet Ambros
comes to that conclusion at the end of a volume written in answer
to Hanslick's "The Beautiful in Music," of which the fundamental
doctrine is that music has not expressional power at all. Ambros set
out to show that it had, but that there was a point beyond which it
could not go.
That point he found set clearly in view in the symphonic works of
Berlioz. He recounts the process of development of that master's
"Romeo et Juliette" symphony. He compares it with Mendelssohn's
"Meerestille und Glückliche Fahrt" overture, and notes that the title
of the latter is an exact reproduction of Goethe's language. But
"there is in the matter the great difference that this tonal work,
even utterly apart from Goethe's poem, is in and through itself
explicable and intelligible, and bears in itself its æsthetic centre
of gravity and the conditions of its existence, whereas in the
case of 'Romeo and Juliet' the centre of gravity lies outside, the
music,--that is to say, in the Shakespearian drama."
Mendelssohn, when he conceived his "Fingal's Cave" overture,
embodied in a sentence the impeccable theory of correctly conceived
programme music. He wrote to his sister that he could not describe
such a thing, but he could play it. Having absorbed the mood of
that landscape, he, being a musician, could reproduce it only in
tones. Berlioz, on the other hand, sought not only to picture in his
music the personalities and passions of the lovers, but he sought
to reproduce in the form of a scherzo the poetic description of an
imaginary conception, Queen Mab, put into the mouth of a character
created by Shakespeare! It was a long way round, was it not?
How great a difference is there between that process and Mr.
Strauss's attempt to convey to us in music the conversation of
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza or the anger of the knight at seeing
the false Dulcinea? The centre of gravity is outside the music.
So it is in "Ein Heldenleben," Strauss's strongest composition,
and in his other tone poems. Tschaïkowsky, on the other hand, was
content to write "Pathetique"--even more than was needed--over his
sixth symphony, and let it stand with that. His "Romeo and Juliet"
overture fantasia is dependent upon itself alone for its artistic
justification. The centre of æsthetic gravity is in the work.
Let us, however, give Mr. Strauss the benefit of his own utterances.
In 1897, in speaking of "Also sprach Zarathustra" he said: "I did
not intend to write philosophical music, nor to portray Nietzsche's
great work musically. I meant to convey musically an idea of the
development of the human race from its origin through the various
phases of development (religious as well as scientific) up to
Nietzsche's idea of the Uebermensch, the Beyond-Man of Goethe."
As a London critic remarked at the time, "even this is a tall
order." Of course Mr. Strauss's word must be accepted. But before
the present writer lies an elaborate pamphlet of some forty pages
by Frederick Roesch and Eberhard Koenig, entitled "Ein Heldenleben,
Tondichtung für Grosses Orchester, von Richard Strauss." It
reproduces sixty-eight themes from the tone poem and has a long and
laborious explanation of the composer's purpose and meaning. There
are similar programme notes for other works by this composer. Persons
who admit the iniquity of such explanations stoutly maintain that Mr.
Strauss does not approve of them. The one before us was published
by F. E. C. Leuckart, of Leipsic. On the last page are advertised
several compositions by Strauss published by the same person.
Furthermore, previous to the production of the "Symphonia Domestica"
in New York last March, Mr. Strauss had steadfastly denied that
there was any programme for the work. "It represents simply a day
in my family life," he said. These statements were repeated in the
official programme note of the concert, written by my colleague, H.
E. Krehbiel, of the New York _Tribune_. The day after the concert
the New York _Times_ published a detailed programme of the symphony,
furnished to the writer, Richard Aldrich, by Dr. Strauss, and that
programme was more elaborate and materialistic than any imagined by
uninformed gropers after the composer's meaning.
Howsoever these things be, the ultimate question remains: Will the
compositions of Mr. Strauss and his kind stand the test of Ambros?
Is their æsthetic centre of gravity within themselves? That is a
true test of all art works. The test of a Corot landscape is not
its perfect portraiture of a place, but its complete and satisfying
existence as a painting; and that, be it noted, is wholly a matter of
artistic feeling in the work itself. The test of a poem is not its
power to convey to the reader a mental photograph of the scene or
action or thought which inspired the work, but to touch the reader's
emotions, to stimulate his imagination by and through itself alone.
Neither the observer of the landscape nor the reader of the poem is
asked to look outside of the work itself for an explanation of its
mood. The picture and the poem fully explain themselves. They lay
before the mind both cause and effect.
This music cannot do. Long ago it was called the language of
emotion, and the embodiment of feeling is its highest province. Even
in the opera, with the assistance of text and action, music should
not strive to go further than this. Its office is to voice the
emotions which lie behind action and speech, to raise to the tenth
power those simpler and more limited inflections and tones of the
voice which are used in the spoken drama. In the great instrumental
song without words it is again moods and emotions that music must
proclaim. Mr. Strauss may tell us that in "Also sprach Zarathustra"
he did not attempt to do the things which makers of programme
explanations accused him of doing, but merely to put before us, in
music, the simple process of the religious and scientific development
of the human race up to the conception of the Beyond-Man.
How easy it all is, to be sure, and how stupidly devoid of
imagination we must all be who fail to read it clearly in the music!
If we fail to find it, it is our fault. Lichtenberg, a witty German,
said, "If a monkey look into a mirror, no Apostle will look out."
We may save ourselves much time and intellectual labor if we listen
carefully to "Also sprach Zarathustra." Dr. Draper packed a history
of the intellectual development of Europe into two substantial
volumes which a thoughtful man may read in a winter; yet he may hear
not only the intellectual, but also the religious development of the
entire human race in Mr. Strauss's tone poem in about thirty minutes.
A benefactor of mankind indeed is this philanthropist, who has not
sought to write philosophical music. He has invented for us a kind of
sugar-coated knowledge tablet. Abolish dry books and listen to the
tone poems of Richard Strauss, and you will have the wisdom of the
ages poured into your ears by trumpets and trombones.
And yet how refreshing to the spirit it is to hear after a Strauss
tone preachment some such work of pure feeling as Schumann's Spring
symphony! Here is no fugued fuddle of the fulminations of science.
Here is no heart-wrung cry of a philosopher from the mountain top,
come down to set whole the disjointed times and wailing because the
populace thinks him a goatherd. Here is no dissector of sated souls,
no juggler with death rattles, no miser of a hope-drained race.
Here is one who served and suffered for the sake of love's infinite
joy, who has trod the valley of the shadow and come to the sunlit
plateau of his heart's desire, and who, as he lifts his brow to the
radiance of the new day, strikes his lyre and bursts into a pæan of
rapture. His music glows and throbs with feeling, for it is feeling
grown too great for the inflection of common speech and so hymned
to us by the myriad-voiced orchestra in one beautiful anthem of the
budding of eternal spring in the heart of a man. That is programme
music which needs no explanatory notes.
"Backward, turn backward, O Time, in thy flight!
Make me a child again just for to-night."
How often shall we who are treading the downward slopes of life
croon that old couplet and yearn for the cradle songs of Schubert
and Beethoven? How often, too, we wonder, will a weary world turn
back with weary brain from the sordid task of transfretating "the
Sequane at the dilucul and crepuscul" with Strauss and his tribe to
the poets of the dawn who smote the great primeval chords of human
feeling? This we may not now answer, for orchestral music is yet in
her infancy and it is possible that the period of to-day is but the
disturbance of a transition.
IV.--STRAUSS AND THE SONG WRITERS
He hath songs, for man or woman, of all sizes.
_A Winter's Tale_, Act IV. Sc. 3.
In the domain of the song new developments have come forward with
startling rapidity in recent years. Every student of musical history
is familiar with the growth of what is called the art song. The folk
song was a simple form, in which a good, round tune, once made,
served for every stanza. The early composers of songs were content to
adhere to this form, which had its musical claim for supremacy, just
as the Italian opera had.
But after a time the imperious demand of text for appropriate
embodiment compelled a departure from the old manner. Mozart set
a pretty fashion when he composed "Das Veilchen" and altered
the germinal thematic idea, by a process similar to symphonic
development, to meet the varying sentiment of the verse. But not much
was accomplished till the birth of the so-called romantic movement.
This was really nothing more than the victory of a principle, which
had for centuries been striving for dominion, and it led the world
to enthusiastic adoration of the songs of Schubert and the operas of
Weber.
Then began the reign of what the Germans call the "durchcomponirtes
lied," literally the "through-composed song." This is the song in
which the music faithfully follows the text and changes in melodic
externals and in harmonic plan to express sentiment. Schubert's
"Erl-König" is a perfect specimen of this kind of song. Of course the
writing of songs in the old strophical form did not cease. Why should
it? There were still plenty of texts which lent themselves readily to
that kind of setting, and if popularity be sought, there is nothing
like a fixed melodic idea.
Gradually, however, those composers who seek always to dwell in
a rarefied atmosphere, who are nothing if not "utter," and who
ceaselessly endeavor to make poor Music a mere handmaid of all the
other arts, have driven the "durchcomponirtes lied" to the verge
of incoherence. The musical idea has become almost intangible, and
all that seems to be left is a vague dispensation of tonalities and
recitativo. For some sanity in this method of writing we have to
thank the arch speculator of Munich, Richard Strauss. Whatever may
be the ultimate outcome of the dispute over his orchestral riddles,
there need be no hesitation in pronouncing him a master of the modern
manner of song writing.
Mr. Strauss's songs belong of a surety to the domain of the
ultra-romantic. There is little of the old-fashioned German lied
in them. It might be possible to trace their descent from the
folksong of Germany, and occasionally one appears in the genuine
"volksthümlisches lied"[1] style. But many generations of artistic
development separate these songs from their progenitors. The strophic
form has quite disappeared in most of them. They are in the widest
sense composed through. The germinal thematic idea is but a root from
which the song grows. It barely sets a style and a direction for the
whole. But it must not be supposed that these songs are in any sense
formless.
[1] The volksthümlisches lied is a variety of song written by
artistic composers on a plan suggested by the folk song. It is the
folk song placed under cultivation.
They have an individual symmetry of form. It is a variety of the
form of the romantic school, which is built entirely upon the
emotional plan underlying the music. The musical scheme, therefore,
consists of a proposition which is worked out by a method of
transition, so that new material springs from the original thematic
germ, and we arrive at novel and striking conclusions.
Of melodic shape in the old sense some of these songs have almost
nothing. But they are none the less luxuriously melodious. Their
melodic nature differs from that of a Schubert song as the melodic
nature of a Wagner drama does from that of a Weber opera. This does
not mean that they are better songs than Schubert's. There are no
other songs as fine as those of the fecund Franz Peter. But music is
making progress, and the methods of song writing will probably change
as fast as those of operatic and orchestral composition. Art is ever
disinclined to stand still.
The harmonic basis of the Strauss songs is the principal cause of
their melodic luxuriance. Strauss harmonizes wholly for what the
Germans call the "stimmung." We have no word which exactly reproduces
the meaning of this one; but let us call it the voicing of the
mood. Strauss's harmony is designed to make an atmosphere in which
his melody floats. At the same time this atmosphere is to envelop
the hearer and saturate him with the feeling of the song. The high
organism of this plan of attack upon the listener stamps it as the
refined product of modern, thoroughly sophisticated art.
It is very trying on the singer. Some of Dr. Strauss's voice-parts,
planned, not as the ultimate object in view, but wholly as a part of
a general scheme, are cruelly difficult. In range alone they make
searching demands upon the vocal resources. In the department of
mental conception of tone--the highest field of vocal technic--they
are as evasive as some of the tonal illusions of Wagner. But they
are not unsingable. On the contrary, once let the singer thoroughly
permeate himself with the harmonic atmosphere, and thus attune
himself to the "stimmung" of the song, and his troubles reduce
themselves to the common problems of production and coloring of tone,
which have nothing more to do with the nature of Dr. Strauss's songs
than with those of all other artistic composers.
It is essential to the success of songs of this kind that the
declamation be arranged with much skill, otherwise that pregnant
significance which is to come of a perfect marriage of sound and
sense will be missing. In this department of his technical labor Dr.
Strauss shows much ingenuity in most of his songs. Sometimes the
text is dramatized in a manner quite masterly. In the entire range
of song literature one would search far to find anything more subtle
or potent than the opening of "Hoffen und wieder verzagen." This is
a piece of dramatic declamation written in the modern recitative
idiom and as distant as possible from the pure lied style; but it is
intensely dramatic.